Criminal Law & Process – Page 14 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

After Return from Prison, Friends Can Be Key to Success or Failure

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:September 3, 2017
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Prisoner Rights Public

New research highlights the importance of friends in determining whether returning prisoners will commit new crimes. A considerable body of prior research has demonstrated the importance of family relationships to the returning prisoner, but a new study John Boman and Thomas Mowen suggests that peer relationships may exert an even greater influence over success or failure.

Boman and Mowen collected data on a sample of 625 serious and violent male offenders, including their self-reported substance abuse and new criminal activity over a fifteen-month period after release from prison. The data also included the offenders’ assessment of their family support and the criminal histories of their closest friends.

After controlling for a number of variables, Boman and Mowen identified several factors that proved to be statistically significant predictors of post-release recidivism.

Crime and Stigma: New Research Explores the Connections

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:August 14, 2017
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Public

The colonial Americans famously had their “scarlet letter” punishments, which marked and shamed the criminal. Today, the stigma of a conviction may be less vividly displayed, but it is no less real. Two interesting new criminological articles present research on the impact of this stigma.

First, an article by Jeff Bouffard and LaQuana Askew considers potential crime-reducing benefits of stigma, specifically in relation to sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws. Such laws, adopted across the United States in the 1990s, require certain convicted sex offenders to register their residence and other information with state authorities on an ongoing basis, sometimes for the rest of their lives. The information is then made publicly available, which can greatly magnify the duration and intensity of the stigma of the conviction.

It was thought that SORN laws might reduce sexual offending in two ways: by deterring prospective offenders from committing crimes that might land them on a registry, and by alerting potential victims to the proximity of individuals who were already registered and hence possibly dangerous. However, several studies thus far have found little or no reduction in offending in the wake of the adoption of SORN legislation.

Going Beyond Police Patrols to Problem-Solving Policing

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:July 3, 2017
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Public Speakers at Marquette

Doing police patrol work is hard, but it often is pretty routine. An officer drives around, waits for calls and responds to them, deals with specific incidents, and writes reports about them. “There’s a simplicity in it,” said Michael Scott, a former police officer and police chief.

But if police work is to be done in the most effective way, it needs to go beyond that routine, Scott said. It needs to aim to deal with or at least understand problems that underlie so many instances of crime, disorder, or other trouble.

That explains why Scott has become the director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, an organization which promotes exactly that problem-solving approach to police work. He is also a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. He was previously a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison.